


Shut your eyes and sing to me...

by fhsa_archivist



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-13
Updated: 2007-09-13
Packaged: 2019-02-05 18:18:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12799704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fhsa_archivist/pseuds/fhsa_archivist
Summary: Jack never sleeps...





	Shut your eyes and sing to me...

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Haven, the archivist: This story was originally archived at [Fandom Haven Story Archive (FHSA)](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_Haven_Story_Archive), was scheduled to shut down at the end of 2016. To preserve the archive, I began working with the OTW to transfer the stories to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2017. If you are this creator and the work hasn't transferred to your AO3 account, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Fandom Haven Story Archive collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/fhsa/profile).

_Shut your eyes and sing to me…_

 

 

He never slept. It wasn’t for lack of trying, it wasn’t for any lack of effort on his part. He lay in the dark, contained in the soft neon glow of the old spaceship that hadn’t even been built yet in this timeline, lulled into a half-aware apathy, the burn of space and time sleeping just below the surface of his skin. He blinked his eyes open, bluer than the lights of his ship, the colour dulled now by fatigue and the rush of days long past and yet to come, but never forgotten…

 

He blamed it on the decades of stasis, a chemically-induced, artificially restless sleep as the twentieth century crawled by, so much time waiting, so much to be done, so long without any purpose…

 

All the things he’d seen, all the things he’d been, kindled inside him, the fire never went away, like a fever, a hunger, a thirst. Water sat quietly in the glass beside his bed, it was never enough, he never got enough to quench the burn inside him. He stared at it now, he wanted it, he refused it, lying still was so hard…

 

He pressed a hand to his chest, trying to quell the burn, the beat of time inside him, never ending, forcing him forward, a time traveller, a mockery of the way he’d slipped in and out of it before; that had been skipping, cheating - this was real time travel. Always moving forward, never stopping, always forward, moving past everyone else, always leaving…

 

They didn’t know. They couldn’t. They didn’t know what it did to a person, he wasn’t cold, he just knew, knew the things they didn’t, knew the things they couldn’t. Hold onto your humanity, he’d laughed at the words, pretty words filled with intentions and promise, empty of substance. There was nothing to hold. It all slipped through your fingers - humanity, places, people, time…

 

Not even Abaddon had loosed the grip of Time yanking him through the years. He wondered if he pulled open his chest if it would pour out of him, out of him and back into the Universe where it belonged, back into the space that it needed. 

 

The water shivered in the clear glass, an echo. He reached up, knocking it to the floor and shivered beneath the thin, cold sheets.


End file.
